The Pew Site

When the Pew family settled in â€œstring town,â€ a series of small houses
along what is now Alma School Road, they stored their hay in a raised area
enclosed by ancient mud walls. In the 1980s, this special area behind the
original Pew adobe home was still undeveloped. With plans to finally sell
this last five acres surrounded by modern homes, Joe Pew approached the
Southwest Archaeology Team for help. Would the museum be willing to excavate
before the site was removed to make way for a self-storage business?

For three years the Southwest Archaeology Team excavated the
archaeological site and recorded the historic Pew homestead in detail.

Excavations revealed a series of Classic Period (AD 1100 to 1450)
structures, both pithouses and compounds. The deeply buried pithouses,
single room structures with floors plastered with â€œcalicheâ€ and dating to
around AD 1150, were found several feet under the surface of the ground. The
pithouse structures found at the Pew Site were very large, measuring up to
14 feet in length, twice the size of the average Hohokam pithouse. After the
pithouses were abandoned, two large â€œcompoundsâ€ dating to approximately AD
1300 were built on the ground surface above them. The occupation at the Pew
Site spanned several hundred years.